This invention generally relates to telephone conferencing, and more specifically to dynamic management of conference line allocation from a conference line pool.
Telephone conferences have become common and are very advantageous in many situations. Participants of meetings in a single company, as well as meetings between multiple companies, may be located at different geographic locations. Often, expenses associated with the participants travel to a single site for a meeting prohibit such travel. Teleconferencing provides a convenient, low-cost solution by allowing individuals from various geographic locations to have a meeting over the telephone. Teleconferencing is also advantageous where a meeting will be very brief, and it is not necessary or worthwhile to have participants take the time to get together for a physical meeting, and where the number of participants in a meeting exceeds the available physical meeting space.
In a typical scenario, a meeting organizer schedules a telephone conference with a conference service provider, and the organizer gives the service provider a list of people who are expected to participate in the conference. The conference organizer then sends each of the expected participants an invitation to participate in the conference at a scheduled time. Each participant may be given a code that the participant uses to establish his or her authorization to participate in the conference. At or just prior to the scheduled time, an invited participant can use his or her telephone to establish a network connection in order to participate in the scheduled conference. Typically, the conference is assigned a dedicated telephone conference line that all the participants use in common during the conference.
In many locations, a limited number of conference lines are available for telephone conferencing, and the conference lines are shared among a number of people. This sharing is done to limit the fixed costs associated with dedicated conference lines. This frequently leads to lines and moderator pass codes being shared. That means that multiple teams may try to use the same line at the same time which hurts productivity and leaves people scrambling for an additional line to try. In addition, there is no accountability to whom is actually using the line.